VERMILION 1

The color vermilion is replete with associations to geology, culture and art history and has compelled me for years as only a color can compel an artist. My thanks to the Kansas City Art Institute for the time and space to explore a new direction while working as artist-in-residence there in 2013.

I work with an old sign painter’s tool, an electric stylus that leaves burned pin-holes when used on a conductive metal table. Large drawings require accumulated layers of marks to create mass and detail, as well as an extended, meditative drawing process.

The Vermilion drawings are made of holes and scorches, pigment stenciled in iconic shapes, and the use of red transfer paper between the electric stylus and the drawing, for color and as a layer of chine-collé.

The drawings’ dynamics reflect frustration, rage and despair at the ongoing, ballooning insanity in our world, as well as in the worlds that are not ours to pervert or destroy. I also endeavor to translate the language of matter itself – with a lexicon of marks and symbols describing imaginary and inchoate states of its being.

I source the immaterial through the material.

Catalog essay by Beth Cullom

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